The phrase "without knowing what the goal is" carries the whole weight. Western interiority has been shaped by teleology — the soul's business is to arrive somewhere, to become something, to accomplish the transformation. That grammar runs through individuation language and spiritual practice alike: the arc bends toward wholeness, the suffering was for something, the descent had a destination. What Woodman refuses here is that grammar at its root. Courage, in her formulation, is not courage toward an end; it is the willingness to remain present inside radical not-knowing — not as a stage before the goal clarifies, but as the condition itself.

Femininity, consciously held rather than enacted automatically, refuses the trajectory. It trusts the moment not because the moment is secretly pointing somewhere good, but because the moment is all there is to trust. This is not passivity. Courage is the operative word, and it implies resistance — against the pull toward purpose-language, toward the reassurance that this particular darkness will have been worth it. The soul that waits for the goal to come into view before trusting is not trusting at all. It is calculating. Woodman is describing something harder and less consoling: presence without the promise of arrival.